Samsung might use Qualcomm chips in most of its North American phones, but everyone else gets the company's custom Exynos chips. The last-gen Exynos 9810 had some issues, but Samsung aims to rectify that with a substantial redesign of the new 9820. It's still using custom CPU cores alongside low-power ARM reference designs, but there's a third cluster of high-power ARM cores as well.

Last year's 9810 had a fairly typical arrangement of four M3 custom CPU cores with four Cortex-A55 cores. This year, the 9820 has two fourth-gen custom CPU cores (probably M4) with four Cortex-A55 low-power cores. You also get two Cortex-A75 reference cores as the third CPU cluster. Samsung says the new design is 20% faster at single-threaded tasks and has 40% higher power efficiency. The tri-cluster design is allegedly 15% faster at multi-threaded tasks. A new Mali G76MP12 GPU is around 40% faster and 35% more efficient than last year's chip.

The Exynos 9820 is also the first Samsung SoC to include a dedicated AI processing core. That should allow future Samsung devices to run AI processes locally rather than offloading to a server. The SoC includes Samsung's latest LTE modem, too. It's capable of 2Gbps with 8x carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO, and 256 QAM.

Samsung says the Exynos 9820 will go into full-scale production by the end of the year. It's likely you'll see this chip in the international Galaxy S10 in early 2019.